Author: Sean Tierney

This week, the long-speculated dismissal of Boston Bruins’ coach Claude Julien finally happened. After 759 games, 419 wins, a Stanley Cup, and a Jack Adams trophy over his almost 10-year run in Boston, Julien is a free agent coach, free to mull options like the Vegas Golden Knights, the New York Islanders, and a slew of other head coach positions that are almost certain to be offered to him as the season goes on.

Every coach gets fired sometime. Julien, great as he was, wouldn’t escape this fate either.

But the fallout since his dismissal has been intriguing. The Bruins led the NHL in adjusted Corsi for percentage under Julien this season but sunk to 28th in the in team shooting percentage and 24th in team save percentage this week.

In the salary cap era in the NHL, the entry draft has become a top priority for general managers. Acquiring players like Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews, Johnny Gaudreau, or Aaron Ekblad is most easily done at the draft table. More and more, GMs are recognizing that players peak at a young age, making long-term deals for early-20-somethings a wise investment, even if valuations are fueled by projection.

On Monday, fans tuned into one of the quieter NHL trade deadlines in recent memory. Despite the slow pace of movements, Matt Cane (@cane_matt) and I set about making visuals to give our takes on each trade.

Here, we’ll look back on a few of our takes from the trade deadline. We’ll focus ourselves with three categories – a trade where we had a similar take, a trade we disagreed on, and our favourite viz from the day.

This summer, the drama surrounding Mike Babcock drew my attention to the salaries of coaches in general. What factors play into how much money a coach earns? Babcock is known as a coach who’s won at every level. Are Stanley Cup wins a factor in what a coach gets paid? Maybe playoff wins? Regular season won-loss records? Something else?

Babcock’s contract – a mammoth 8 year long pact worth $50 million to coach the Leafs – brought the subject of coaching salaries to the forefront. At $6.25 million per season, Babcock earns more than double the annual pay of any other NHL coach with a publicly known wage.

For the Leafs, spending huge amounts of cash on team personnel makes sense – there’s no cap on coach salaries so that Leafs can wield their monetary advantage to sign the best bench boss available. For Babcock, it’s difficult to fault the long-time Red Wings coach for taking the big pay day. Beyond enriching himself (which he really, really did), Babcock has been very open about his desire to push coach salaries forward by setting a new standard. He probably didn’t imagine he’d earn more than Joel Quenneville and Darryl Sutter combined or that his term would extend three years past any other NHL coach. But, as perhaps the game’s best coach, the Leafs were willing to pay whatever was needed to pry Babcock out of Detroit.

But what types of thinking go into deciding how much a team is willing to pay its coach? Did Babcock earn the money because of his vast experience? Or maybe his excellent regular season record over a decade in Detroit? What factors correlate with coach salaries?

Welcome to Sunday Notes, where we try to rehash important developments occurring on Hockey Graphs and elsewhere in the CORSI twitter league in less than 500 words. I’m sorry if we forgot about your post, or misconstrued what you said. We don’t care. Don’t @ us. Just do better next time. – asmean (w/ a secondary assist from Sean)